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Lava soap of grease-cutting,
Industrial, heavenly clean.
Lather up work, the rituals.
Off grime and dirt. Off day’s
Everything, children and the
Wife who crawls on all fours.
Water down the drain’s flower,
Metallic mouth wherein flows
My father’s love’s absolution.
From Postcards by Joseph O. Legaspi (Ghostbird Press, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Joseph O. Legaspi. Used with the permission of the poet.
In the last hour of night, I lean into
a book that multiplies its pages.
A settling and a continuum:
bedding down of a sedentary body
and a story of an expanding universe.
For nearly three months I’ve not walked
out into the evening, my skin un-kissed
by summering breeze, wafts of ghost
If our angels hover above us,
they will see a darkening cornfield, the spectral traces
of lightning bugs, and two brothers
lying among the stalks.
We come because sometimes it is hard to live.
My mermaid, I watched you scaling milkfish.
Your hands and arms were silver,
and your body flecked
with otherworldly raindrops.
You were a silver mine to be mined.
Perched on a high branch of your mother's
mango tree, I saw only a glimmer
of the blade as you scaled the fish, up-